When comparing Kakoune vs UltraEdit, the Slant community recommends UltraEdit for most people. In the question“What are the best programming text editors?”UltraEdit is ranked 32nd while Kakoune is ranked 44th. The most important reason people chose UltraEdit is:

UltraEdit has small memory usage and allows for fast parsing/searching when handling large files.

Pros

Pro

More modern than vim

Pro

Actively developed and supported

Pro

Text selection mechanism

Kakoune works on selections, which are oriented, inclusive range of characters, selections have an anchor and a cursor character. Most commands move both of them, except when extending selection where the anchor character stays fixed and the cursor one moves around.

Pro

Will be familiar to vim users

Kakoune first started as a rewrite from scratch of vim, but then ended up being another text editor altogether. So it's inspired in a lot of ways from vim.

Pro

Very expressive

Kakoune provides a very expressive set of commands, including various objects selection (paragraph, blocks, words), alignment support, conditional selection filtering...

This set of command is expressive enough to implement all the provided auto indentation logic.

Pro

Good UNIX citizen

It follows the UNIX philosophy by doing one thing well (text editing) and interfaces nicely with other CLI tools.

Pro

Handles large files (>1GB) extremely well

UltraEdit has small memory usage and allows for fast parsing/searching when handling large files.

Pro

Works perfectly with remote files

Supports several protocols for accessing remote files and working on them with the same ease as local files. Files can be integrated in the projects as normal files.

Pro

Fast, stable, easy to use

Pro

Extremely customizable GUI editor

UltraEdit offer the best of both worlds. it has a full on GUI along with all the shortcut commands you need. There's no need for the user to suffer 80 char limitations of a terminal editor.

Pro

Highly flexible

UltraEdit allows you to handle groups of files as a project

Pro

Probably the most versatile general editor in existence.

If you need a general editor, UltraEdit is the way to go. If you were writing C/C++ all day, then this would be your editor. If you need to slog through large files then this is your go to editor. If you need to go through XML files, then this is your editor. If you need to sort data, then this your my editor.

Cons

Con

Small community

Con

Lack of options/ability to customize

The ability to customize Kakoune are currently quite limited. Everything is hard coded, and there is a lack of options to choose from.

Con

Proprietary

It's not free and a license costs $79.99.

Con

The themes introduced in version 20 regressed certain aspects of syntax coloring

The themes simplified the syntax highlighting which lost the capacity to have as many colors as one wanted to define. Now it is limited to around 20 different colors. In general it's not a problem but in certain cases it broke coloring.